Archive for February, 2007

(Click here for a live webcast of the FM’s Budget presentation – starting 11AM IST) (Click here for live intraday SENSEX values) Here at IEB, you (our faithful readers) can always trust us to get excited about something like the FM’s budget presentation. CNBC’s got the pretty women covering the reactions on the trading floor, [...]

There is no shortage of hype about India’s superpowerdom in IT and Telecom. However, the truth seems to be far from it. Why is it that there is not a single provider out there who is capable of providing decent broadband access, for instance? The prevalent logic seems to be that the only thing that [...]

It always intrigued me that noone, especially in academia, had bothered to do robust research on the downstream multiplier effects of the IT-ITES industry. Anyone who has looked at the industry in any seriousness knows there have to be serious multipliers involved. All of those cab drivers, construction workers, caterers etc are the multiplier at [...]

A lot of bandwidth has been used up to discuss what model of development India should adopt: the Chinese model, the American model, the French model etc. I myself have sucked up quite a bit of bandwidth on this issue. However, I was reading an Indian business magazine (I apologize, I cannot remember which one) [...]

Wonk nirvana The 2007 ICT Opportunity Index, the ITU explains, “has benefited from the expertise of several international and research organizations, (and) is based on a carefully selected list of indicators and methodology. It is an important tool to track the digital divide by measuring the relative difference in ICT Opportunity levels among economies and [...]

Yes, the IT industry has to do more for India. But not what Amartya Sen says it should Amartya Sen made a JFK-esque speech asking the IT industry what it had done for India. His point was not that the IT industry isn’t doing anything for the economy at large—he concedes that it is—but that [...]

I had the chance to attend a lunch meeting earlier today with a handful of MPs from India who were in New York as part of the Indo-US Parliamentary Forum. The audience was a largely receptive business-minded one with questions like “what do you think about the future of real estate in India?” All of [...]

The Indian economy must be an elephant. At least that’s what it feels like when you read the stuff that observers are saying about it. Blind people describing what they perceive the elephant to be through their sense of touch comes closest to characterizing the quite varied descriptions of the Indian economy. Here’s Cait Murphy [...]

Well Nanubhai has certainly stirred up a storm with his overheating post. So now that the intial burst of energy has started to die-down, and the dust has begun to settle, it may be well worth sifting through the various pieces that constitute this whole debate, to try and see what exactly is at issue [...]

Some interesting commentary in the papers this week: Anantha Nageswaran’s opening salvo, in the newly launched Mint: Central bankers in most of the developed world have taken that to heart in dealing with financial markets. Financial markets, in theory, have more participants than those engaged in the economic marketplace. Hence, the outcomes of their buying [...]

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I saw the cover of the new issue of the Economist. The tiger’s face is hilariously confused, his tail is on fire; the Indian economy is overheated. Game, Set, Match. Regular IEB readers have seen Edward, myself, and others question the premise of these judgments, and [...]